One or more aspects relate, in general, to facilitating processing within a computing environment, and in particular, to facilitating processing of compression and decompression operations.
In one or more computing environments, a compressed form of information, rather than the original, uncompressed form, is maintained on storage devices. The compressed form occupies less bytes than the original form. As a result, transmitting and maintaining a compressed form of information requires less time and space, respectively, compared to performing the same functions with the original form of the information.
In such environments, an operating system (OS) provides a mechanism to perform the compressing and decompressing operations. In one example, to provide these operations, the operating system incorporates a zlib open-source software library, which adheres to the DEFLATE standard compression technique, specified in the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) RFC (Request for Comments) 1951 specification. The mechanism may include a software implementation in which a user executes many instructions on a general-purpose processor to perform the compressing or decompressing, or it may use a special purpose hardware implementation that is connected to an input/output (I/O) port of a system, in which an I/O device performs the operations.